From: Pop City
The South Side's firm was asked by Google and the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) to develop a platform that gathers data on "rugged" mobile devices and creates detailed maps, which will be used to chart the Surui territory in Brazil. Armed with the technology, the tech-savvy tribal leaders plan to put the maps on Google Earth to prove irrefutably that illegal mining and logging is taking place on their 600,000 acres.
"For thousands of years this tribe has been known as one of the fiercest in the Amazon," says Josh Knauer, CEO. "They ate their enemies! Cut down by disease, they traded their bows and arrows for laptops. Now they are using the Internet as a tool in the fight to save their rainforest."
The Surui, pronounced su-roo-wee, was 5,000 strong up until the 1960s when it first came into contact with outsiders during a highway construction project. The following decade brought disease, poverty and continual fighting, nearly decimating the population. Today, only 290 remain.
Much of the region around the tribe's 600,000 acres has been cut down and burned by logging companies, says Knauer, who visited the homeland earlier this year. With hundreds of timber mills around them, and thousands of illegal logging jobs at stake, the tribe is under pressure to sell their land.
The elders have tasked Chief Almir, 35, with saving the tribe.
Almir was sent to college where he learned the value of a business plan. The tribe's strategy is to put the homeland on the global carbon offset marketplace where, like cap and trade, a company will pay the tribe to preserve its land for the right to pollute elsewhere.
The tribe stands to make tens of millions, says Knauer.
"We were brought in because we have easy to use tools to help communities collect data," says Knauer. "It has been such a major success that the Amazon conservation tem is bringing us in to do other projects in the Amazon."